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PARTISAN REVIEW
rational in a series made by placing more or less intact doors and
windows in relationships that wrenched them from their expected
context. Yet despite the odd abuttments and intersections, the
resulting constructions were peculiarly literal. They remained,
prosaically, accumulations of recognizable parts that happened to
be doors and windows, rather than meditations on doorness or
windowness or passage or shelter. (The problem is not unique to
Armajani. It plagues all artists who incorporate found objects in
their work; if the object insists too much on its original function
instead of being subsumed by its new context, the work usually
suffers. Duchamp is, of course, the exception, since the role of his
subversive ready-mades was to assault their new context with their
previous histories.)
Armajani's table variants suffered for the customary reasons.
No matter how extravagant their materials , how improbable
the piling and inversion, they remained manifestly tables, albeit
nonfunctional ones. I keep wanting to like Armajani's work better
than I do. I find what he aspires to rich and potentially fasci–
nating, but I keep being let down by what he builds. He seems too
content with the givens of the objects he purports to improvise
with and remarkably insensitive to nuances of thickness, regu–
larity, horizontality, verticality, and the like. The "tables," in the
end, were predictably foursquare and evenhanded. That they
were useless was not enough to shift them from the realm of inert
object to potent sculpture. No, I am not advocating deconstruc–
tion.
In her three more or less concurrent exhibitions, in April
and May, Louise Bourgeois provided a lesson in how found ob–
jects can be transformed and turned into metaphor. She also
made it plain that questioning the limits of what is proper to
sculpture, perhaps even to taste itself, is not solely the province of
the young. The shows , works from the 1950s at Sperone–
Westwater and recent work at Robert Miller Gallery and Galerie
Lelong, ranged from the mysterious to the trivial, from the reso–
nant to pure kitsch.
It
was difficult to believe that the same person
was responsible for all of it. Bourgeois's installations at Lelong
may have been the most unexpected aspect of the three exhibi–
tions. Unlike those of a few years ago , which were dim enclosures
to be entered by the viewer, the pieces at Lelong contained
entrances with stairs, housefronts with overscaled , monstrous
